by Cara McKenna
She looked to the house, and saw Mike’s face framed in one of the small windows that flanked the front door. Her shoulders dropped… then squared as she realized what she needed to be doing.
Mike got his chance to end this thing that I started. And by all accounts, he’d fucked it up. His trust was a lot to demand after last night, but she swung the car door open and headed for the house. Mike let her in and she faced him in the entryway.
“I’m going to say good-bye to him.” Even just saying those words aloud, something grated inside her. Saying good-bye to him… it felt wrong. As wrong as her actions of the previous night.
Mike’s own reaction was instantaneous – a wince of surprise and disgust. “I don’t want you to.”
“I appreciate that. But this is complicated for me. I don’t think you know what it’s like to let someone into your life in such an intimate way, then to suddenly not be able to say good-bye. To end it for yourself. I won’t touch him – not in any way. But I’ll say good-bye to him, face-to-face. For maybe three hours now, he’s been somebody you wanted to punch – and now you have. But for the past couple of months he’s been as much a part of realizing your fantasies as I have. I’m going to tell him thank you for that, and apologize that it’s all had to end the way it has. And then I’ll never see him again.”
“I think it’s simpler, just letting it be done with —”
“I wasn’t asking for your opinion, or your permission.”
His expression hardened, then surrender smoothed his brow. “Fine. If that’s what you need.”
“It is. I’ll be back in an hour and a half. If he’s even home.”
Mike nodded, and she turned back around and walked out the door.
She found Bern’s address in her e-mail. The drive took less than twenty-five minutes in actuality, yet it also took three days, thanks to her impatience, and three seconds, according to her nerves. In a blink, in an ice age, she was taking her cue from the other vehicles on Newett Street and parking her car half on the sidewalk.
She eyed Bern’s truck, and his house. So many intimate things she’d come to know about the man, yet she’d never seen his home. Her heart beat hard and her legs felt like water as she walked up the little concrete path to the front porch. Her steps creaked the boards and a dog’s distant bark answered her.
“Molly,” she muttered, remembering Bern’s smile in that video he’d sent her, seeming like it was a million years ago. She pushed the bell.
His tall shape appeared through the door’s pebbled glass. Dog nails clicked on the other side and she heard that deep voice say, “Down.”
He cracked the door, his surprise evident in a heartbeat. “Sam.” He let the door swing in, stooping to take hold of the Lab’s collar.
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
“Look up a sec,” she told him.
He did, and she studied his jaw. It looked swollen and red, and it would no doubt look ten times worse in the morning. “How does it feel?”
“Like an angry cop punched me in the mouth.”
“I’m sorry. He didn’t come over here expecting that to happen.”
“Did you want to come in?”
She nodded.
Bern stepped back and Sam shut the door behind her. He let his dog go and Sam gave her ears a scratch.
Bern pointed to a bed in the corner. “Go lie down, Molly.” She obeyed reluctantly. Bern crossed his arms over his chest. “He know you’re here?”
“Yeah.”
“And why are you here?” It wasn’t anger putting that edge in his voice, Sam realized, but uncertainty. A lot was riding on her answer, and that scared her.
“To apologize for how everything seems to have ended. And to say good-bye properly. If that’s okay.”
His shoulders drooped.
You wanted to hear that I’ve come running to you, didn’t you? And she’d be lying if she denied that her body wanted to cling to his just now. But in the bright and sober light of day, the temptation was powerless.
“Can we sit?” she asked.
Bern nodded to his couch and they sat with most of a cushion between them.
“I’m sorry about your jaw.”
“I may have earned it, just a little.”
“Well, it should never have happened. And it wouldn’t have if I’d had a decent set of boundaries last night and not let you stay the way I did.”
“We didn’t know anything would happen.”
Sam bit her lip, letting herself entertain a scary question. “Didn’t we?”
Bern’s eyebrows rose a fraction.
“I can’t speak for you, but I can admit I fucked this up. You should have been a close-enough man. I should have liked you… been attracted to you, not infatuated with you.”
“You should have settled for someone you weren’t that into?” he asked.
“In the wake of what’s happened, and feeling all this guilt, and regret? Maybe.”
Bern laughed, sounding incredulous. “You should have stuck with some guy you could go through the motions with, so your husband could get his mind blown?”
“I don’t know. But probably.”
Another shocked laugh and he shook his head. “I think you deserve way better.”
And in her heart, she knew he was right. The way she’d let things get away from her last night, that had been wrong. But feeling for this man, given everything she’d done with him, for Mike’s pleasure… Bern was right. What felt wrong, truly wrong, was the way it was all ending now. And all because she’d fucked up, and lost track of priority number one, Mike’s primacy.
She sighed, tired. “He never asked me for this, you know.”
Bern frowned. “No?”
“No. I offered. I offered to role-play it with him, and I offered to make it happen for real. It was always meant as a gift, from me to him.”
“One fuck of a generous gift.”
She shrugged. “I’m not kinky like him.” Or she hadn’t been. Lately, she wasn’t so sure. “I had a perfectly satisfying sex life from the moment he and I met, but he always had this secret thing he was yearning for – this thing he never asked to be hardwired to want. This thing he never got to experience outside his own head. I mean, his fantasies scared the crap out of me when he first explained them.”
“Understandably.”
“But like I said, he didn’t choose those things. After I sat with them a long time I thought, if it took… I dunno, getting slapped in the face, say, for me to have really, truly satisfying sex, would he go there for me? And at first, no, he wouldn’t have. He’d have been horrified, like I was when I found out he liked to imagine I was cheating on him. But if getting slapped could light me up the way the cuckolding thing lights him up? We’d have found a way to go there, if that’s what it took to blow my mind. And I’d have felt like I was suddenly being served a feast, after always settling for scraps. Does that make sense?”
“You’re talking to a man with a kink of his own. So yes.”
“There you go. So when I quit being afraid of the things that excited him, I was ready to see what they might do to him. And it was fucking amazing, finding out. I even found a few little kinky seeds of my own hiding in there, the deeper we’ve dug into it. So this was never about me getting pushed, or submitting. He never pressured me, or guilted me, or even asked for it. He never made it feel like anything other than my gift to give him.”
“You promise?”
She nodded. “It’s been my hands on the steering wheel, from the moment we pulled away from the curb.”
Bern stared at her long and hard, blue eyes narrowed.
“I can’t decide if you look angry or curious,” Sam said when the silence grew too heavy to bear.
“What makes it work, the two of you together? What does he give you that was enough to make you think, I’m gonna marry this guy?”
“That’s so hard to say… Lots of things, really. He makes me feel secure and attractive, and
he sees the things in me that I most want people to see. That I’m smart and fun. I can relax around him. And I dated a lot of guys I didn’t feel that with before I met him. We just fit.”
“Sexually, too.”
She nodded. “He always fit for me that way. And since he came clean about his needs, I’ve been able to fit for him. With a little effort, and some nerve.”
Bern nodded. He looked sad, she thought.
“Had you wanted to hear something else? That I had doubts about me and Mike?”
His smile was faint and unsteady. “Am I that transparent?”
Sam didn’t think she’d ever felt so simultaneously flattered and uncomfortable.
“I want you,” he said softly. “You have to know that. And yeah, for more than just the sex – not just because you realized my fantasies.”
“Mike would say the same.”
Bern’s jaw was clenched, and she wondered how badly that must hurt. As much as whatever he was feeling had to hurt?
“I won’t leave him. But exploring with you was incredible. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.” Maybe at times when I shouldn’t. And hopefully, someday, Mike will want that. For me to remember you and fantasize about you. Just not any time soon.
“So it’s all over?”
She nodded. It has to be, doesn’t it?
“You guys gonna look for another man to fit the bill?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine it just now.” Though saying good-bye, burying this bond while it was still so vibrant, and vital… It was far harder to imagine that this was how things really had to be.
Another sad smile. “You telling me I was special?”
“Yeah, you were special, Bern. And it’s looking like this could only have worked if you and I hadn’t been quite so good together.”
“That’s some cruel twist, huh?”
“Yeah. It really is.”
Though as Sam walked to her car a minute later, she couldn’t help but wonder, Does it really need to be? It felt like a crime, when she and Mike had discovered more chemistry with that man than she’d ever bothered hoping they might. And just as they’d reached a point where all three were getting their wants fulfilled – Mike’s curious appetites, Bern’s desire to show off, and Sam’s newfound craving for two men at once – now it had to end? Shouldn’t right now be the point at which it all took off?
Except we fucked it all up last night.
But had they really? Permanently? And fucked it up how, precisely?
By being human beings. With feelings, and impulses, and moments of weakness.
So many times, for the sake of her role, she’d imagined cheating on her husband. She’d always been cruel in those fantasies, selfish, shameless. But now it had actually happened, in a way, and yes, she had been selfish, but not cruel. Vulnerable and mixed up. And while she didn’t feel ashamed, per se, regret hounded her. Her actual infidelity hadn’t fit Mike’s script. It had been too quiet, too emotional, too real. Too human.
What had Bern said to her that had set these gears turning? Something about how the alternative to their present predicament was to do all those things with a man she was indifferent toward. The way Mike looked at it, that was the only safe option, if they wanted to try this again someday. The thought turned her stomach.
And beneath the uncertainty lay sadness. Grief, to imagine losing all those vibrant new facets of her sexual self. To imagine she’d never again feel what she had, with her body worshipped by both of theirs.
I’ve given everything I have, accommodating Mike’s needs. Last night I needed to feel those things with Bern. Not for keeps, but for a little while. With a man she’d performed a hundred filthy acts with, and yet true romantic attachment was too taboo to ever move on from?
Why did that smell so distinctly of bullshit?
Sam sat holding the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at nothing, as an unexpected emotion took shape in her chest, growing and solidifying with every breath.
Anger, or something like it.
And as she drove home, she assembled those feelings into thoughts, into an argument.
These sexual adventures had been worth gambling their marriage on, after all. Surely preserving them was worth fighting for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
M
ike paced the front landing for fifteen minutes or more, mind and heart racing, pulse pumping, body tight. When the sound of his own footsteps began to grate, he went to the living room to stare blindly at ESPN. He’d been pissed when Sam had left, but it mellowed quickly, leaving him feeling scared and stupid, ashamed of how he’d lost control. He squeezed his aching fist and let the pain humble him and cool his temper.
Beneath the jealousy and the anger lay sadness. They’d had it so good, these past few months. They’d ridden his kink further into the wilds than he’d ever expected, and now that was over. Thanks to Bern losing track of his place… and thanks to Mike as well. It was all thanks to him, in the end. He’d drawn them all together, created this whole new entity among the three of them, and now he’d stomped on the thing the second it slipped off its leash. The second that human nature hijacked the script, and —
He sat up straight at the sound of the lock flipping. “Sam?”
“It’s me.”
He stood, his legs feeling boneless, and met her in the hall.
“Let’s sit down,” she said. “I want to talk.”
“Okay.” Jesus, that didn’t sound good. She had her business face on, and Mike had to wonder, how had his actions sounded, as retold by Bern? Psycho, no doubt. And had they been? He’d felt nothing but blind, searing righteousness in the moment.
Mike switched off the TV. Sam sat cross-legged on one end of the couch, and he did the same – close enough to take her hands in his and rub her knuckles. “What happened?”
“Very little. I told him I was sorry it had to end like this. He said the same. I thanked him for everything he’d been for us, and we said good-bye.”
“Okay. That sounds civil.”
She sighed, shaking her head, then met his eyes squarely. “Mike, it doesn’t have to end like this.”
“He has feelings for you. You… you have feelings for him. I know it’s hypocritical – I know it’s fucking ironic, given my fantasies, but this can’t work. It could only ever have worked for as long as it stayed purely sexual.”
“Do you think we’re ever going to find someone as right as he was, ever again?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure we should ever even try, given how it’s gone.”
“You can’t really mean that. Not after all the fun we’ve had these past couple of months.”
“I know it sucks, but it’s a catch-twenty-two. You need to feel something for a guy if you’re going to feel secure enough to sleep with him. I won’t feel secure if I’m worried you might have feelings for him, for real.”
Another sigh, and she gazed down at their hands. “I just feel like…” She looked up. “I just kind of think that’s bullshit, Mike.”
He blinked, confused.
“It’s bullshit, and it’s unrealistic, and it’s not fair. I drove around after I left his place, and I thought a lot about this. Before last night, all three of us were living our fantasies. You were getting cuckolded. Bern was getting watched and recorded.”
Mike rankled at the man’s mere name, whispered by Samira only last night, no doubt, too quiet for the computer to catch.
“I was getting to be with two men,” she went on, “something I never realized would light me up the way it has. And he and I aren’t teenagers, incapable of keeping our feelings in perspective. Now that it’s all out on the table, I don’t understand why it has to end. I told you already, I’m not going to leave you for him. If you can trust that, and he can accept it, why does this have to stop?”
“Be —”
“You’ve had no trouble dealing with me sharing my body with another man. Can’t you see your way to sharing jus
t a tiny piece of my heart? Just one little sliver?”
Mike didn’t reply, way too muddled to make sense of his feelings. It all sounded so idealistic, so naive, after what had just happened.
She squeezed his hand. “I know I hurt you. We both hurt you, last night, but we never meant to. Maybe he does have feelings for me, but he didn’t plan this. I believe that. I know it.” She pressed a fist to her heart. “And the entire situation is so complex and intense, it feels like the only thing we can really control is our intentions.”
